Benchmarking Overview on Methods for Spatiotemporal Detection of Dune Erosion in Physical Modeling

As increasingly complex objectives gain scientific attention in physical experiments on coastal dune erosion, novel and more demanding requirements arise, such as reliable high-resolution methods for measuring erosion processes. This work presents a technical assessment of four distinct laboratory survey methods that were employed for the sake of comparison in 1:7, reduced-scale dune erosion tests. In addition to conventional measurements with terrestrial laser scanning, mechanical bed profile sensing, and lateral camera recordings, novel solid-state laser scanning technology was applied. By utilizing a Blickfeld Cube 1 LiDAR, measurements with a sampling frequency of 0.68 Hz and a minimum spatial resolution of 7.0 cm were conducted, enabling targeted investigations such as (1) the detection of subaerial notching and dune face slumping or (2) the derivation of spatiotemporal erosion volume development. Based on the acquired findings, specific application recommendations are provided regarding all four methods deployed.